Scandal hits Taiwan baseball

The Taint of Scandal in Taiwan's Pro League

New York Times, October 28, 2009

TAIPEI — The latest baseball scandal to hit Taiwan has many gloomy about the future of a sport that has given the island an identity.

On Monday, prosecutors opened an investigation into whether players in Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League deliberately lost games in exchange for payoffs. Former players and alleged gambling ringleaders have been detained. On Wednesday, the police questioned nine more players, eight were named as suspects, according to local media.

The allegations include the play of the Brother Elephants, the island’s most popular team, as it lost the Taiwan Series to the Uni-President 7-11 Lions. The Lions won the seventh, and final, game Sunday.

Taiwan’s 20-year old professional baseball league has been plagued by such corruption scandals. Gangsters have in the past intimidated players, but this time, a spokesman said, prosecutors have ruled out the possibility that players were threatened or intimidated.

But league officials had been upbeat recently, saying game attendance had bounced back this season, that the government was doing more to promote the game and that the tiny league — numbering only four teams after others folded amid scandal or financial losses — was retrenching.

For many Taiwanese, the stakes are far higher than a mere sport’s survival. Baseball is one of the few arenas in which Taiwan has won recognition on the world stage.

“In the past, we used baseball to raise our morale and reinforce our national identity,” said Yu Jun-wei, author of a recent book on the history of baseball in Taiwan and a professor at National Taiwan Sport University in Taichung. “It still serves a political purpose. China always says we’re part of their territory. But we can use baseball to prove to ourselves and others that we still exist in international society.”

Yu said the scandal was especially damaging because it involved the Brother Elephants and one of its top stars — the pitcher Tsao Chin-hui, the first Taiwanese to have played in U.S. major league baseball, for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Colorado Rockies.

Tsao was one reason attendance rose this season, his first in Taiwan’s professional league, reaching an average of 4,000 per game, double last year’s dismal showing, according to the league.

Tsao maintains his innocence but said prosecutors had searched his home.

Richard Wang, director of international affairs for the league, said prosecutors had searched the Brother Elephants’ dormitory Monday, seized three cellphones and detained two former baseball players. He said on Tuesday that the league had been “hurt badly” by the latest allegations.

“It’s devastating, for sure,” Wang said. “If what the media said is true — that players were voluntarily cooperating with bookies — that’s really bad news.”

“In the past, players were throwing games under pressure and threats from the mafia. If this time there were no threats or pressure, and it was just the players’ greed, that’s really sad.”

The Japanese brought baseball to Taiwan after they colonized the island in 1895.

Taiwan’s string of Little League titles in the 1970s confirmed that the game was a rare arena for the island to shine internationally. The victories were a sorely needed morale booster in a decade in which the United States broke diplomatic ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing as the legitimate government of China and Taiwan lost representation in the United Nations.

Many Little League heroes went on to play in Taiwan’s first professional league, established with high hopes in 1990.

Since the peak of “baseball fever” in the early 1990s, though, the game’s fortunes have waned. Attendance has plummeted, as has television viewership, especially after satellite channels brought U.S. Major League Baseball and basketball into Taiwan homes.

Last year, Taiwan’s league had shrunk to four teams, down from 11 in two leagues in the late 1990s, after the dMedia T-Rex team was kicked out amid game-fixing allegations and the Chinatrust Whales folded.

Worse, though, was Taiwan’s loss to China’s team at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Not only is China an obvious political rival, it also had virtually no history of baseball until very recently, compared with Taiwan’s century of play.

“It was a humiliation, because we always thought our standard was much higher than China’s,” said Professor Yu. “Baseball is one of the few sports we can beat them at.”

The loss sparked a round of soul-searching and government commitments to shore up the game. A second loss to China at the World Baseball Classic in March prompted the island’s then-prime minister to declare the Taiwan team’s performance “unacceptable.”

According to Lance Lan, an official at the cabinet-level Sports Affairs Council who was previously involved in baseball promotion, the government has adopted a four-year, 1 billion Taiwan dollar, or $31 million, plan to help turn the sport around. “It’s to help upgrade our country’s baseball, especially at the grass roots,” he said.

If the game-fixing allegations prove true, the grass roots may be the only thing left. Chris Day, a spokesman for the Chinese Taipei Baseball Association, said the Brother Elephants’ coach had publicly vowed last year to disband the team if its players were found to be involved in throwing games.

“The Brother Elephants are a major team — they’re like the New York Yankees of Taiwan,” said Day. “If they close down, it’s going to be very hard for the league to sustain itself.”

“This isn’t four guys sitting down and cheating at mah-jongg, it’s a matter of lying to the whole public and baseball-loving population here,” Day said.

Richard Lin, secretary-general of the Chinese Taipei Baseball Association, said that better compensation and free-agent rights could also help keep players honest. He said players’ salaries averaged just 100,000 Taiwan dollars a month but should be triple that.

Regardless of the scandals, though, baseball will remain Taiwan’s national pastime, Lin said, because Taiwanese baseball heroes, like the New York Yankees pitcher Wang Chien-ming, continue to inspire younger generations.

Basketball may be all the rage, but few Taiwanese are physically able to compete on the level of the National Basketball Association or in international team competitions.

“Taiwanese like baseball because they know we have a chance to get a championship, or at least second or third place,” Lin said. “But in basketball? Impossible.”

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